Life at court does not satisfy a man, but it keeps him from being satisfied with anything else.

Dissimulation, even the most innocent in its nature, is ever productive of embarrassment; whether the design is evil or not artifice is always dangerous and almost inevitably disgraceful.

To forget someone means to think of him.

It is easier to enrich ourselves with a thousand virtues, than to correct ourselves of a single fault.

Jesting is often only indigence of intellect.

Everything has been said, and we have come too late, now that men have been living and thinking for seven thousand years and more.

The nearer we come to great men the more clearly we see that they are only men. They rarely seem great to their valets.